Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  As an adult, Ned’s longings center on England. “Oh home, my home, my forefather’s home! I have come back to thee!” he shouts, approaching the threshold of an old English manor, Braithwaite Hall. He supposes himself its long-lost heir but eventually will learn that the title belongs to someone else. You can’t go home again.

  “Is there going to be a general smash?” Hawthorne asked Ticknor in December. Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitting Republican, had been elected president by less than 40 percent of the popular vote and without a single southern state. One by one, the southern states began to secede.

  “Secession of the North from Freedom would be tenfold worse than secession of the South from the Union,” the temperate Longfellow was ablaze. John O’Sullivan begged Frank Pierce to get back into politics and work toward “Reunion” to rid the country of “this wicked & crazy Republicanism.” Pierce proposed meeting with the other living ex-presidents—Buchanan, Fillmore, Tyler, and Van Buren—to try to settle the “quarrel.” The New York Herald groaned, “It was the imbecility and political chicanery of some of these very men that brought about the present evils.”

  Alarmed, Hawthorne feigned disinterest, writing Henry Bright in England “how little I care about the matter. New England will still have her rocks and ice.” Besides, he added, “the Union is unnatural, a scheme of man, not an ordinance of God; and as long as it continues, no American of either section will ever feel a genuine thrill of patriotism, such as you Englishmen feel at every breath you draw.” After England, America no longer seemed a political marvel, divinely sanctioned, as he’d argued in the Franklin Pierce biography. “How can you feel a heart’s love for a mere political arrangement,” he mused.

  Hawthorne loved his country, he hated it, and he wanted to flee. But flee to what? To a place where shifting political tides don’t uproot everything one holds dear every four years? And where is that? England, where he has no birthright and for whose hierarchies he has no conscious respect? Or perhaps the place is to be found up the steep steps in a sky-parlor, with the hillside jutting to the north and the meadow, softly dappled, to the south.

  For a while, Hawthorne was able to escape in the sky-parlor, speculating with gallows humor that his new book might be finished by the time New England was a separate nation. But it progressed slowly. “There is still a want of something, which I can by no means describe what it is,” he wrote after completing a couple of opening scenes. Starting and stopping and starting over again, he squirms. “The story must not be founded at all on remorse or guilt,” he reminds himself, “—all that I’ve worn out.” He couldn’t sufficiently motivate his characters. Who, for instance, is the lord of the old manor, Braithwaite Hall? He must be a miserable cad—he’s part Italian—or else a thug, or else wicked in some way; or maybe he is poisoned by a Bologna sausage, Hawthorne jokes harshly.

  He cobbled together a stronger version of Ned’s story, placing it just after the American Revolution, a metaphor for fratricidal conflict, Tory against rebel instead of North against South. In this draft, Hawthorne concentrates on the old doctor, Ned’s stepfather. He’s a self-involved Englishman called Dr. Ormskirk or Grimshawe or Grimsworth, who cultivates in his ward a longing for the past—easy to do, because Ned seeks psychic compensation for what he does not and can never have, namely, a sense of connectedness with the world.

  Just as significant, however, is the way that the doctor and Ned are the same person, at least symbolically: the doctor looks back into the past with anger and grief; Ned wants from that same past a homeland, a parentage, an escape from ontological solitude. And both of them are Hawthorne, old and young: the fifty-six-year-old writer in the present and the writer years before, daydreaming in Salem over ancient boneyards.

  Ned is a shy, imaginative child not like other boys. “I want you to be a man; and I’ll have you a man or nothing,” the old doctor shouts at him. But the brandy-swilling doctor is no paragon of unsplotched masculinity; he’s angry, tyrannical, and, like many a Hawthorne character, an outcast persecuted by the community partly because he cannot tolerate its small-minded conformities. When a street brat flings a mud ball at him, he catches the boy and pounds him with a stick. Cruelty meets with cruelty, aggression with counteraggression; the only recourse against a violent and unhappy manhood seems passivity: doing nothing.

  By comparison, the Old World looks good, with its tokens of “learned ease,” the euphemism for aristocracy. England is the imagination of refuge, safe and snug, like Hawthorne’s high tower. Ned, grown man and republican, nervously defends his preference. He’s earned the right, hasn’t he, to subside in a “quiet recess of unchangeable old time, around which the turbulent tide of war eddied, and rushed, but could not disturb it. Here, to be sure, hope, love, ambition, came not; but here was—what just now, the early wearied American could appreciate better than aught else—here was rest.”

  Having labored for four long years in Liverpool and, before that, in two different Custom Houses; having lost his job in one of them along with the comforts, however stultifying, of his hometown; having jockeyed for appointments that never came and blistering his hands at Brook Farm to purchase a fair share of disillusion there and elsewhere, Hawthorne sought rest. He didn’t not want to be pelted by anyone or anything. He wanted—he told himself he’d always wanted—to write, far above the noisome crowd.

  But secession and the sundered Democrats were the agonizing, unfathomable reality.

  On Saturday, April 13, 1861, a day of showers and shine, Sophia shouted that Fort Sumter and the South had fired on each other.

  Hawthorne put away his manuscript.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Smell of Gunpowder

  If a group of chosen friends, chosen out of all the world and all time for their adaptedness, could go on in endless life together, keeping themselves mutually warm in their high, desolate way, then none of them need ever sigh to be comforted in the pitiable snugness of the grave.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Septimius Felton”

  HAWTHORNE CREDITED James T. Fields with helping him find an audience. “My literary success, whatever it has been or may be, is the result of my connection with you,” Hawthorne thanked his friend in 1861. “Somehow or other, you smote the rock of public sympathy on my behalf.” Before Fields, Hawthorne had been known mainly to a small band of writers and intellectuals; Edgar Allan Poe had called him “the example, par excellence, in this country, of the privately-admired and publicly underappreciated man of genius.” That was in 1847; Hawthorne was forty-three. When he was forty-six, Fields published The Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne entered the most prolific period of his life.

  Like Sophia, Fields supplied the appreciation and encouragement—and publishing wherewithal—Hawthorne needed in order to write and to face the consequences of writing: what it meant, how he felt about it, the uneasy anticipation of reviews or sales. Fields knew Hawthorne was a perfectionist unwilling to release any of his work to the public before he had polished it to a high gloss, as if its unsullied surface protected him from rejection. He weighed each word, balanced each sentence, scrutinized each character for motive and depth and meaning. Extant manuscripts reveal his vigilance, how he organized each scene, wringing from it nuance, embedding it with significance until at last it satisfied him. “I am sensible that you mollify me with a good deal of soft soap,” Hawthorne grinned, “but it is skillfully applied and effects all that you intend it should.” The two men understood one another.

  But sitting beneath the spirelike ceiling of his tower, he found it difficult to work. He felt restless, anxious, confined. His tower was too hot in summer, too cold in winter. “He always, I believe, finds fault,” Ellery Channing had once observed; the man who wrote compellingly of a sense of place could find none for himself.

  “The war continues to interrupt my literary industry,” Hawthorne ruefully informed Ticknor, saying he wished he could perform some “useful labor”—an old theme going back to his youth—and h
e proclaimed that if he were younger, he’d volunteer. His own blood was up. In milder moments, he confessed that he didn’t quite understand “what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected.” The elimination of slavery? “It may be a wise object,” Hawthorne nominally agreed with Horatio Bridge. Writing to Francis Bennoch, he was less sure. “We seem to have little, or, at least, a very misty idea of what we are fighting for,” he repeated. “It depends upon the speaker, and that, again, depends upon the section of the country in which his sympathies are enlisted.” Southerners fight for states’ rights; westerners, for the Union; northeasterners, to end slavery. “One thing is indisputable; the spirit of our young men is thoroughly aroused.”

  If Hawthorne fancied himself shouldering a musket, the vision didn’t last. “I wish they would push on the war a little more briskly,” he joked without humor. “The excitement had an invigorating effect on me for a time, but it begins to lose its influence.” Throughout the spring and summer of 1861, news from Washington was contradictory and disheartening, and though he complained to Horatio Bridge that “all we ought to fight for is, the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members shall be lopt off,” he bristled with patriotism, almost against his will, in the face of Henry Bright’s English insolence. “Every man of you wishes to see us both maimed and disgraced,” he snapped, “and looks upon this whole trouble as a god-send—if only there were cotton enough at Liverpool and Manchester.” As for Bright’s qualms about rising death tolls, Hawthorne sourly replied, “People must die, whether a bullet kills them or no.”

  Hawthorne’s friends in England gasped. “If this is the literary tone of the United States,” said Richard Monckton Milnes, “what must be the rowdy?” Hawthorne didn’t care; he’d quit idealizing the sceptered isle, its green hedge primly clipped, and put away his unfinished tales about American claimants and English patrimony. To continue with the Grimshawe manuscript was folly while drums of war beat at the Concord Common and Julian marched off each morning to drill at the town armory. Far easier was rooting around in his English journals for essays, especially since Fields now sat in the editor’s chair at the Atlantic. Hawthorne sent him “Near Oxford” and “Pilgrimage to Old Boston,” and in the next two years produced nine essays in all, seven of which were published in the Atlantic—“capital papers,” Fields would approve, for a “delectable Book.”

  In December he consented to being photographed. “He allowed the photographer to poke about his sacred face and figure,” Sophia reported to Fields, “arranging even the hairs of his head and almost his eyelashes, and turning his brow as if on a pivot. He was as docile as the dearest baby,” she marveled, “though he hates to be touched any more than anyone I ever knew.” A wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand, Hawthorne stares as if afraid to move from his seat lest an epithet fall from his expressionless mouth. His hair lies in thick, graying abundance on the side of his head; brows darkening his eyes but not the circles underneath them. Hawthorne admired the photographer’s handiwork enough to mail a copy of the finished product to Bridge.

  The photographer poked at Sophia too. Bent slightly forward in a chair, collar finely scalloped, brooch in center place, and her skirts spread voluminously about her, she looks as plain as she believed she was. “I have no features,” she lamented. True: nothing of her ebullience, her stubbornness, or her unconditional enthusiasm peeps from mouth or eye. Instead she seems either ready to assist the fussy photographer—or to run away.

  The Hawthorne children look fretful. Una, handsome at seventeen, sneers; ten-year-old Rose frowns; and Julian, an attractive boy of fifteen, looks as though he might burst into tears: children at wartime, nervous and sad.

  Paymaster general of the United States Navy in charge of provisions and clothing, Horatio Bridge invited Hawthorne to visit him and his wife, stationed in Washington, D.C., to glimpse the war firsthand. Hawthorne pleaded lassitude of mind or body, hard to say which, and a new romance, he hinted, in the works. Mostly, though, he paced lugubriously on the hillside. Worried, Sophia took the invitation as a godsend and asked Ticknor if he’d accompany her husband to Washington.

  The two men set out on the railroad the first Thursday in March, chugging through a frostbitten Massachusetts to New York and then on to a balmy Philadelphia. At each stop, the number of soldiers increased, young men with smooth cheeks and scratchy uniforms as eager for news as the two travelers. Ticknor managed everything. He bought gloves for the two of them; he arranged their transportation; he paid their bills. “He says this is the only way he can travel with comfort,” Ticknor wrote to his wife, “and it is no trouble to me.”

  Though Hawthorne wanted somehow to participate in the war, he also wanted to shut it out. So he watched. From the sooty window of the railway car, he saw jerry-built fortifications, cannons of iron, and smoky canvas tents, all flying by, and when he stepped off the train in the Washington station, it was still swarming with soldiers and muskets even though he and Ticknor had missed the sixty thousand men who’d waded into muddy Virginia just hours before. Hawthorne had refused to travel at night, and they had been delayed. Ticknor was disappointed.

  Thanks to Horatio Bridge and other connections, Ticknor and Hawthorne lost no more time. They joined Representative Charles Russell Train and the Massachusetts delegation for the presentation of an ivory-handled leather whip, made in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Abraham Lincoln, the homeliest man Hawthorne had ever seen. “If put to guess his calling and livelihood,” Hawthorne would subsequently write, “I should have taken him for a country schoolmaster.” Lank, loose-limbed, and awkward, Lincoln appeared before the delegation, his hair rumpled, his frock coat rusty and unbrushed. His feet sloshed in shabby slippers. As for his vaunted perspicacity, Uncle Abe, as Hawthorne called him, would “take an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in front,” Hawthorne loved his puns. “On the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place.”

  Next day, Hawthorne was taken to Virginia, where he and Ticknor heard the commander address his troops, and the day after that, they splattered through the bleating rain to the military base at Harpers Ferry. A document signed by Secretary of War Stanton authorized their passage by steamer to Fortress Monroe, the naval base near Newport News; on another excursion, they pressed south again, this time to Manassas, as a guest of the Baltimore &Ohio Railroad, along with the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis and the reporter Benjamin Perley Poore, several members of Congress, several officials of the railroad, several newspaper editors, an English correspondent, and the Bridges. It was a group of do-gooders, spectators, and enthusiasts straight out of the pages of “The Celestial Rail-road.”

  Hawthorne felt good. He lingered in Washington, willing to sit for the painter Emanuel Leutze, who was applying the final dabs to his manifest-destiny mural in the House of Representatives. Leutze supplied Hawthorne with several glasses of champagne and several cigars to achieve a ruddier, more affable image—though not much of a likeness—than anything achieved at Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Photographic Art. Those photographs, taken by Alexander Gardner, show Hawthorne grimmer and grayer, his skin as wrinkled as crumpled paper around the large, weary eyes that reveal nothing. He stands erect in a Napoleonic pose, white collar caressing his face, coat lapels a snazzy velvet. Yet of the several pictures of Hawthorne taken that day, all stern, there is a special one. Hawthorne’s hand rests on a table as his lower body slowly washes into whiteness; here, he seems approachable, palpable, evanescent, and mortal, all at the same time.

  Revived, Hawthorne opened the back door to the Wayside on April 10, and in less than a month produced for the Atlantic a tour de force called “Chiefly About War Matters by a Peaceable Man.” He’d lost none of his satirical power. The essay is Swiftian, corrosive and funny, and directed at
the foibles both of humankind and, more precisely, the Atlantic readership.

  Generals are bullet-headed, the Monitor a rattrap, war a savage feat of recidivism. “Set men face to face, with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready to slaughter one another now,” Hawthorne writes, “after playing at peace and good will for so many years, as in the rudest ages, that never heard of peace-societies, and thought no wine so delicious as what they quaffed from an enemy’s skull.” When the Army of the Potomac finally crossed the river after months of delay, it encounters no one: “It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder.” And Hawthorne’s proposals for the conduct of war are venomously comic: send old men to war instead of the young: “As a general rule, these venerable combatants should have the preference for all dangerous and honorable service in the order of their seniority,” he writes, “with a distinction in favor of those whose infirmities might render their lives less the worth keeping.”

  Fed up with political poltroonery, Hawthorne rails at one side and excoriates the other. War spills blood, despoils the landscape, sends bumpkins into battle unaware of any noble cause, if noble it is, given the country’s prodigality in “sacrificing good institutions to passionate impulses and impracticable theories.” Once again Hawthorne offers his chilling proscription: “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes. We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for.”